A tearful Anita Perry said Thursday that she and her husband, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, had been “brutalized” by fellow Republicans and the news media, and suggested that the attacks were linked to his Christian faith.

Anita Perry said that God had called her husband to run for president and likened the decision to encountering “a burning bush.” She said that God was testing Perry with his current difficulties.

Perry soared to the top of the polls after his August jump into the race, but he’s since slipped. He’s been hurt by less-than-solid debate performances, questions about his policies on issues including immigration and his brash comments, such as calling people “heartless” if they disagreed with allowing in-state tuition for the children of illegal immigrants.

Speaking in Tigerville, S.C., Anita Perry acknowledged that “it’s been a rough month” for the Perrys.

“We have been brutalized and beaten up and chewed up in the press to where I need this today,” she told the audience at North Greenville University. “We still feel called. We are being brutalized by our opponents, and our own party. So much of that is, I think they look at him, because of his faith. He is the only true conservative — well, there are some true conservatives. And they’re there for good reasons. And they may feel like God called them, too. But I truly feel like we are here for that purpose.”

Perry has credited his wife with encouraging him to run for president and has said he was called to run, but he stopped short of saying that God called him.

The governor’s religious views and his relationship with evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress have been in the spotlight. Jeffress told reporters at the Values Voter Summit in Washington last weekend that he believed Mormonism was a “cult.” Two men running for the GOP presidential nomination are Mormons, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. Jeffress has endorsed Perry and introduced him at the summit.

In an emotional recounting of the Texas governor’s decision to run for president, Anita Perry said the Lord spoke to her before persuading her husband to run.

“God was already speaking to me but he (Rick) didn’t want to hear it,” she told the sympathetic audience. “I said you may not see that burning bush, but there are people seeing that burning bush for you.”

Anita Perry discussed her lifetime of church attendance and credited her late grandfather, a deacon in her Abilene-area church.

“I’ve never told this to anybody before,” she said, fighting back tears and gesturing toward heaven. “My grandfather still speaks to me today.”

In another appearance, she also waded into the issue of taxes. When asked in South Carolina about her husband’s tax plan, she took aim at Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 economic proposal. “When I hear 9-9-9, I want to call 9-1-1,” Anita Perry told a group of women at the Cribbs Kitchen in Spartanburg, S.C.